A Frog on Dry Land
by Mellifer
Summary: Somewhere in rural England, a person visits a world that is not hers anymore, but that she still cannot let go. My first story here. Please be nice.


**A frog on dry land**

A smell of wet earth and fertiliser crawled through the air, albeit no rain had fallen and the nearest fields were sufficiently afar still to be indiscernible through the loosely positioned trees. Coppice stood scant, so daylight lightened up moss and grass. Nothing was moving in that light, except for the obligatory gnats and one placid dragonfly or two. If you harked better, their humming became audible and nothing else. Until roughly four moments ago, the screeches of tits and robins had incited the dragonflies to fly faster, until a loud bang had run the black-white and red blurs, obviously easier to impress than the dragonflies, off the air. Thus, the bang was the only thing the robins and tits noticed about the woman who had appeared from nothing in the shadow of a maple tree. The short-sleeved black blouse was a concession to the comfortable temperature she had not made with her long jeans. For orientation purposes, she looked around fast, making her pragmatic ponytail jump first onto the left shoulder, then switch to the other. With ease she found the pond that she had made her eyes seek out. Out of the shadow of the maple tree, she walked over to the path leading along the water's edge. One could see that the path obviously was not made to be frequently used, as four feet barely could fit next to each other. She stopped at the edge and inspected the pond and its closer surroundings at length. A serene smile was on her lips, when she noticed the anticipated frogs. There were three that seemed to have decided the bang had been caused by nothing dangerous, and so dared to go ashore on the opposite edge. Their clumsy crawling amused Hannah. She liked frogs dearly, although they always seemed out of place: a rather unorthodox way of eating, a call not even able to irritate, unwieldily they moved at land and only really mastered one movement – the leap, if executed into the water, their only defence against animals actually able to walk. They could swim in fact, but neither fast nor persistently nor gracefully. Against avid fish, again, only fleeing was left to them, this time in the opposite direction. They needed both domains and could shun one of them as little as the other. So, whenever one became dangerous, the managed to seek refuge in the other and wait, until they returned. They were cursed in that one home never sufficed. The existence as borderliners might possess its advantages, yet life in water had to be interrupted again and again to breathe air. She wondered whether the fish understood that.

Hannah turned away from the water and from the frogs. She did not watch the path a lot, nor the dirt track it led to, since she knew the route anyway. It was nice to be here again; soon the fields appeared between the trees, green ones and yellow ones, and the track went along a country road, where exhaust fumes replaced wet earth and fertiliser. Hannah enjoyed the walks on her trips, despite them actually being intended as a measure of caution. The trees around the pond quenched the noise of apparating and lowered the probability of haphazard encounters (and consequential complications) decisively. Yet they also helped her to slowly empathise with the world she was entering for a brief time. She did her whistle-stop trips alone on principle, without it ever having been proclaimed as a rule by anyone. Her children never questioned that mommy occasionally went away from home for half a day, since people – including mommy – regularly did stuff out of house. And her husband would certainly accompany her if she asked, but why should he even? To him, these visits meant nothing and, actually, Neville did not really understand why they posed a necessity for her.

After roughly half an hour of walking, row houses replaced the fields and she ceased being the only human on the road. Two girls were leaning on the next best house's wall with routinely expression-lacking faces, and, for a moment, Hannah considered pointing out to them the holes in their jeans, but desisted from it. After turning twice, she had left the residential district and arrived at a street with several small shops. She stopped and studied the shopsigns. The corner shop had changed owners yet again and Hannah started asking herself why people were still willing at all to take over a business that was so obviously unprofitable. The only real restaurant of the street, previously in ownership of a silent man who had always been old, had closed as well since she had come over last autumn. A bakery had moved in instead. The former bookstore on the other side of the road though still was vacant, which probably was rather conducive to the competitor some twenty houses over.

Said competitor was Hannah's first target. There was no special book she intended to buy - there was nothing special at all, really, that she wanted to buy – but she still wanted to look around. Bookstores had an air of eternity because a lot of what they sold had already been on sale during Hannah's childhood. Most of it she only knew by the title, as she had never been a diligent reader, but that Shakespeare, Jane Austen and Tolstoy still existed, was enough for her to be there, was as every year. Among the children's' books, she discovered three titles or four she had read as a girl but way more volumes in squeaky colours were too new for that. She leafed through this or that one, without really reading alone. When the sales girl asked if she was searching for something, Hannah responded she only wanted to look. She had thought about bringing her children such new books several times, but had realized very quickly they took place in a world they could not possibly understand – and that Hannah could not explain anymore either. She toured through most of the other shops as well, the shoe shop, the corner shop and even the obvious tourist trap.

She omitted the electric shop. Hannah only entered it every few years in a rush of hybris, only to find there was a lot she could not collate, and being there was a source of aggravation and not much else. Movies appeared to be sold on CDs by now, and she could not pin down for certain the function of several gadgets. Instead, she entered a café ( _Blacksmith's_ ), the only house of the road with walls plastered in white, not brick walls. The „house-made soup" (as advertized outside) turned out to be a beany stew; not the worst. Two puffy-faced men at the next table discussed a new war with contempt in their voices. Hannah was nonplussed; she knew of no war; when she heard about a bush and his poodle taking a part in the war, she calmed down: probably some kind of TV show or so. She paid, studied her change and unconsciously smiled a bit since old Elizabeth obviously still reigned, although even her mint portrait looked old now.

Actually, she had wanted to buy several items of muggle clothing, but she refrained from it: she did not want to be here anymore, she wanted to go home. Quickly she stepped to the outskirts of the town and turned around once again. She had not met anyone she knew – as was to be expected in such a one-horse town. Since the war that had cost her family's lives, there was nobody left in the muggle world with whom she stood in contact. And yet, Hannah thought, there had been a possibility of running into somebody. Many half-bloods and muggle-born people had disappeared during the war and never reappeared. Not the least of them had surely been caught by the death eaters, but Hannah hoped for ever single one of them that they'd managed to build a new life in another world. Hannah asked herself whether they had been capable of severing themselves off entirely of her world, the magical one, or whether they did in fact have to catch magical air ever now and then to breathe and to satisfy their desire and their nostalgia – like frogs coming ashore. Hannah did not return to the pond. She strolled, until she was out of sight of the town and there were no cars close by. To the next passing car, a common summer's country road presented itself, with cornfields, with birds, without any people.


End file.
